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Understandings of sustainability transformations: from national governance and local planning to everyday practices.

The project is led by Åsa Nyblom , Phd student at IVL. 

How can we bring about sustainable change in society? This is the broad umbrella question that has driven me and guided my focus throughout my professional life in applied and often collaborative sustainability research. It also forms the overall focus of this thesis, which I am writing as part of the TRANSPLACE research school and the Department of Urban and Regional Studies at KTH, but in my capacity as an employee of IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute. As I already have a licentiate degree, my thesis will build on research results spanning a period of 15 years. 

The preliminary title of my thesis is: Understandings of sustainability transformations: from national governance and local planning to everyday practices.

I am currently revising how to formulate my purpose and research questions more precisely. But broadly speaking, the purpose of the thesis is to provide a richer, empirically based understanding of how different actors and places today relate to sustainable transformation. That is, what understandings and courses of action they see and act on, based on their perspectives and contexts. I hope that the results, together with theory (existing and possibly newly created based on the results), can shape actionable knowledge and strategies for the future in order to bring about the sustainable societal transformation we need to actually happen.

Two questions I particularly want to explore:

  • How do conceptualisations of sustainability and narratives about the future play a role in societal sustainability transformations (both those that happen and those that do not)

  • How can narratives and scenarios be used to expand transformation capacity as well as scope for action?

My research is based primarily on qualitative, exploratory and co-created ethnographic methods, and I have often used a framework for Social Practice Theory (Schwanen et al. 2012, Shove 2003) to explore the material, social and ecological interactions between the world and people. Right now, I am interested in the utopian approach to policy, that is, to ‘think first about where we want to be, and then about how we might get there’ as described by Ruth Levitas (2001, p. 450).